Wellington managed services provider, LAN Tech, has shrugged off the 6.5 earthquake that struck the city on Sunday at 5.09pm.
Managing Director, Paul Mc Quinlan, said the company's disaster recovery systems kicked like clockwork and the company expects to be back to normal business by Tuesday.
“I think today will be pretty much a write-off, but we’ll see things back to normal tomorrow morning,” he said.
McQuinlan said LAN Tech provides support and services of varying degrees to about 120 customers in Wellington and that only one of those experienced a brief interruption of connectivity.
“We had a skeleton support staff on. We provide managed support services to our clients and we were rather pleased to see that none of our clients were down and reporting any alerts,"he said. " We did see one client that went briefly off line but came straight back on line. So that was probably just Internet issues.
“The building we’re in is down in Thorndon Quay and is rock solid as so we’re very fortunate. Our own datacentre was totally unaffected by the quake, as well."
McQuinlan said the office had almost no signs of damage from the quake which struck at 5.09 pm and was centred in the Cook Strait.
“We had one certificate fall off the wall, that’s all. Unfortunately, a lot of the CBD sites are quite damaged. We’ve been on standby for our clients, but in town it’s quiet as a church at the moment.”
McQuinlan said as long as there were no further big shakes, things would return to normal very quickly.
“In Wellington, a lot of people are pretty well prepared and have processes in place. Certainly with our sales. And our own DR and Business Continuity kicked in. Fortunately, communication lines haven’t been impacted by this,"he said.
“Our management staff all check in with each other in order to co-ordinate activities. One of the first things we do is determine if our systems are operational, and if they’re not we have a DR site up in Palmerston North. We’re reasonably well prepared in that respect. Next step is getting communication out to our clients and seeing what assistance we’re able to give to them.
“A lot of our clients have their own DR systems in place. But they still rely on us to help them through that process so we have to make sure our own systems are as resilient as possible.”
McQuinlan said that events such as this helped sell the managed services model.
“It goes a long way towards that. Even though a lot of businesses may have their own resources internally, in an event like this even having access to their premises even to able to do anything is one of their biggest challenges. As demonstrated by this event it doesn’t take much to knock out access.”